Another day my laptop got broken so I had to find a quick solution of how to use information resources that I have available from any computer that I can get access to and even more – to do that in comfort, like from my own machine. Now I want to share my solution with you. This particular setup should be useful to students doing computing courses or for any IT person. However, should you check Ubuntu Software Center you will find a huge library of software that suits almost everyone.

Storage device: 8GB USB stick (the faster the better)

Operating system: Xubuntu 12.04/12.10/13.04/14.04 Desktop – “perfect for those who want the most out of their desktops, laptops and netbooks with a modern look and enough features for efficient, daily usage. It works well on older hardware too”

Use a Browse button to choose Xubuntu image you just downloaded (in my case it is called xubuntu-14.xx-desktop-i386.iso)

Select the letter of your USB flash drive

and use the slider at the bottom to adjust the size of your home folder where you will keep your files. By default you can use maximum 4GB for your home directory on your USB drive. This is because home directory is a single casper-rw file, which as any other file can not exceed 4GB limit on FAT32 system. For this reason 8GB USB stick is perfect for what we want to achieve and after the process you still will have over 2,5GB free space

Now it’s time to boot our PC from USB drive we just created. Instructions how to boot from DVD/USB/LAN/etc. can be found on a user’s manual of your machine or just google for it. But most of the time it is enough to follow short instructions during the start up of the machine, for example, “ESC – Boot Menu”, “F12 – Boot Device” and so on.

It is very likely that when your Xubuntu desktop boots up for the first time you will see “Restricted drivers available” warning. Just click on it and activate drivers that are shown on a list. Since you have your home directory on the USB drive all system/program changes will be saved on it so you don’t need to set up your desktop everytime it boots. Although you might need to activate/install an extra drivers for other machines/devices you are going to use in the future.

From now on you are free to set up your system in any way you like or to use one of HowtoForge’s articles to do that, but you also might like the way I set it up, so please have a closer look

You can use either Ubuntu Software Center, Synaptic Package Manager or Terminal Emulator from top menu to add/remove software.

I’ll start from removing software that I don’t like or don’t find it useful to me.

To add (or remove) an item to the panel right click on a panel (it can be top or bottom one) and select Panel>Add New Items… Pick any item that you are interested in from a list. In our case it is Free Space Checker plugin (xfce4-fsguard-plugin). Click Add and Close if you are done. Now you should see new item on your panel and if you installed Free Space Checker, you will see how much of free space you have for your documents.

## respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu users.
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu precise partner
deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu precise partner
## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by third-party
## developers who want to ship their latest software.
deb http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main
deb-src http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main

For Xubuntu 12.10

## respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu users.
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu quantal partner
deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu quantal partner
## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by third-party
## developers who want to ship their latest software.
deb http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal main
deb-src http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal main

Update source listsudo apt-get update

Now you may want to install Skype or Adobe Reader.sudo apt-get install skype acroread

Do not forget to use Bleachbit periodically to free up some space on your USB.

2 Comments

Cool, do you know if you could attach your USB drive and boot it in a virtual machine? If you could do that then you could really have some power in Windows 8 Client Hyper-V. You could run two operating systems at the same time. I guess you can already achieve that in Oracle’s VirtualBox though.

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